Blogging about blogging

Corp-blog
Corporate blogging. It’s nothing new. Over 5% of the Fortune 500 have an external (public) corporate blog. Wikipedia has a short article on the subject, which states that “market research done in the first half of 2006 indicated that 34% of large companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%.”

A Google search provides quite a bit more information, including the VP of TechRepublic, Bob Artner, providing a short video with tips for professional blogging.

For ease of reference, his tips boil down to this…
Don’t make the mistakes of personal blogging:

• Bloviate (pompous)
• Loud
• Obnoxious
• Gabby

Instead, remember these principles to put your best face forward:

• Tone — keep a professional tone
• Audience — address a broad audience
• Focus — stay on topic
• Frequency — generate content frequently
• Yourself — be genuine

Sounds simple, right? A blog is a friendly and congenial PR channel to discuss your industry, products, clients and the topics that relate to them all. Your audience comes to you, unlike traditional marketing. Your company is your focus/topic. You can have nearly anyone at your company, or even your clients, do the writing. … but is it really that simple?

Even the casual blog needs to present ideas concisely, honestly and effectively. No reader wants to comb through pages of an article that reads like a stereo manual or a political ad. The effectiveness of a blog depends on several qualities, in addition to those described in Artner’s video. (Sorry, no cute acronyms here.)

1. Informative – the signal-to-noise ratio has got to be high enough to add value, or your article won’t be worth the effort to keep it bookmarked or linked
2. Engaging – enjoyable/witty writing style that hooks and keeps the reader’s attention
3. Accessible – easy to get to and subscribe to (Atom and RSS feeds having moved into the position of the Usenet newsgroups of the ’80s and ’90s), with an eye to simple and even cross-platform presentation to reach an increasingly mobile audience

Readership
In fact, if the goal is to generate an audience (and even a community), thereby increasing market traffic, these elements are absolutely ESSENTIAL. Granted, those Fortune 500 companies can simply rely on brand-recognition to generate traffic, even to their blogs, and they have a much larger pool of contributors. How does the ubiquitous “little guy” get and keep an audience? If your company is lucky enough to be part of a community-minded industry, such as “green” construction or vehicles, open-source software, or even certain pockets of consumer goods, your audience will usually form its own community (if it’s not already out there, waiting for you to tap in). Some research to identify your audience is well worth the time and effort.

Once you know who your readership will be, consider what kind of impression they already have of you. What does your corporate website already say? Do you already provide the public with press releases and other marketing information? Is a blog going to be redundant, or will it enhance your existing image? Think about the message(s) you want to send… and receive. Some experts even suggest that well-orchestrated blogs can substitute for the traditional one-way communication of websites or press-releases, creating a much more personal relationship with the dialog inherent in the medium.

A large software giant like Sun Microsystems certainly adds a “human” face with an entire network of employee-generated blogs. Microsoft (at least, their Automatic Update team) uses blogging as a means to announce and discuss support and product issues. It’s not just the big fish, though; small businesses can benefit by using blogs, if you understand the “blogosphere” and its residents.

Next Episode
Next time, we’ll address blog content. In the meantime, here’s some homework…
Blogging Beginner Mistakes and counterpoints
Writing Style for Blogging
Blogging Techniques
Usability Tips

oh, and re-read Chris Campbell’s Argument for Small Business Blogging

Future Problem Solving

If you’d asked me anytime between age 14 and 18 whether one of my extracurricular activities would factor into my career, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that it’d be Future Problem Solving. From the name, you might think it was a course, something silly like Underwater Psychology or Economics. FPS was our school’s equivalent of Debate, only it was a team effort, happened on paper and involved less Logic. We had teams advance to state competitions in a couple of those years, though, so we were fairly good at it (which is impressive, considering we were a small farming community with one high school for the whole county).

But what exactly is FPS, you ask? Well, you can look here, but to summarize:

Well, a handful of 4-person teams are given a “fuzzy”. That’s a vague description of a problematic situation, which might boil down to something like “Officials at Whatsit School District are concerned about the increasing truancy in the area,” or “The lead engineers of Rockets R Us have found that the valve seals of the SR23 rockets have been shipped to Siberia, exposing them to -50°F temperatures.” Then each team brainstorms problems, both those contributing to the situation and those arising from it, by writing ideas on slips of paper for 20 minutes. Ideas can be spoken and even discussed (in brief), and ideas can be based on others, but no critique is allowed. When the time is up, the slips are gathered and sorted by group consensus to weed out duplicates, then the remaining selection is narrowed down to 20 items. These 20 items are assessed by the team, who decides which one underlying problem they will attempt to solve. This is written up in more detail, then the team brainstorms solutions to this problem. These are also sorted and reduced to a list of 20. The team then writes 5 positive criteria (least cost to taxpayers, fastest to implement), picks 8 solutions and scores them based on the 5 criteria. The winning solution is then written into a one-page presentation covering all aspects of implementation (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How). We affectionately called this write-up the “Snow Job”. Guess who nearly always got chosen for that task? *beaming smile*

Four years of this.

Combined with one of the top high school English curricula in the state of Indiana, a passion for reading that started at age 4, and a love of computers that started around age 9, I was primed for a career in Technical Writing. I just wish I’d known in college that Computer Science (before “IS” or “IT” became the field-name) would be the way to go, rather than Physics and Linguistics.

Welcome aboard!

Isn’t it strange that writers rarely write about writing?

I’d like to personally welcome you to the wit and (hopefully!) wisdom of a professional word wrangler. I’m a technical writer for a small software company in Dallas, TX, with over a decade of experience in the IT industry. I’ve made a few attempts to write fiction, but I am sadly lacking the storyteller’s gift. Organization and analysis, on the other hand, come easily. I’m still fairly new to my chosen career in technical writing, with only a few years under my belt, but my passion for detail and accuracy seem to serve me quite well.

Since I don’t have a college degree as a technical writer (as yet), I’m left to my own devices for researching techniques and methods. What I’ve found over the years is a painful lack of technical writers talking about technical writing. Plenty of fiction writers maintain blogs and write novels about writing novels, but where are the documenters, the knowledge base content creators, the managers of the volumes of information that is the lifeblood of almost every IT company? (Answer: they’re busy.)

So, in an effort to fill that gap, perhaps with useful and insightful information for other budding technical writers, I present you with this documentation of my journey.

Music to work by

It’s interesting the kind of music that helps me actually get work done. You’d think that word-less mellow background music would do it, right?  Something like Deep Forest or Amethystium?  Not at all.  I fall asleep — even with a quad mocha to start the day, an inspiring project and comfy work environment.  Turns out that I need wall-of-sound, minor key tonality, heavy guitar, strong lyrics and dense synth effects.  At least, that’s what Pandora.com tells me. It used to be Gravity Kills and NIN, but now I lean more toward Birthday Massacre and Collide. (I suppose the girls are a little more “chipper”.)

Thusly acoustically armed, with a big mug of orange-spice tea to sip and hummus+pita to nibble, I’ll now be getting back to writing some test cases.